Random inspiration

This is the fresco on the wall of Cell 25 of the Convento di San Marco in Florence.

Over the course of the commission for decoration of the dormitory, Fra Angelico’s direct participation in painting the frescoes seems to have diminished, while that of Benozzo Gozzoli and his other assistants increased. This is especially evident in the images of the Crucifixion with St Dominic in the novices’ cells 17 an 20 of the south corridor, which seem to have been painted almost entirely by Benozzo Gozzoli. Other artists seem to have executed several frescoes along the east corridor, as suggested by the somewhat awkward postures and gestures of the figures, the unmodulated contours and flat colours. An example of these can be seen in Cell 25.

Antonio del Castillo, a pupil of Juan del Castillo and Francisco de Zurbar�n was the most important artist in his native C�rdoba. The present almost sculptural depiction of one of the patron saints of C�rdoba shows St Acisclus holding a sword and a martyr’s palm.

Between 1505 and 1510, Bramante added a new extended choir behind the main altar to the to the Quattrocento church reconstructed between 1472 and 1477 on the orders of Pope Sixtus IV. It was commissioned from Bramante by Julius II to house the tombs of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and Cardinal Girolamo Basso della Rovere (d 1507). The tombs, created by Andrea Sansovino, are set below innovative Serlian windows either side of a square space covered by a saucer dome, approached from the pre-existing crossing through a barrel-vaulted bay, with another barrel-vaulted bay and apse beyond. The second barrel vault has coffering modelled on the entrance into the Pantheon, and the lowest coffer on the southern side is left open to make a window, an arrangement sometimes found in ancient cryptoportici.

Apart from the saucer dome, frescoed by Bernardino Pinturicchio (c. 1510), the interior is remarkably stark, only articulated by plain pilaster-strips. It typifies the conception of true all’antica architecture that Bramante arrived at late in his career.

The photo shows the interior of the choir.

During the 1450s Mino produced a steady stream of portrait busts that benefited from his study of antique busts in Rome; the inscription on the marble bust of Niccolò Strozzi records that it was carved in Rome in 1454. The almost brutal naturalism of the portrait, the alert expression of the subject, with the head set at an angle to the torso, and the elegant surface finish of both flesh and cloth are sophisticated solutions to the problem of bust portraiture, not the work of a tentative beginner.

The early busts show a remarkably sensitive appreciation of the dual nature of portraits as both a record of individual features and a commemoration of the sitters’ status. Mino’s insistence on a sense of movement and on an almost palpable link between viewer and bust is present in all his portraits.

This pulpit was originally sculpted for the old Church of St Peter and St Paul in Mechelen. When the church was demolished, the pulpit was moved to the present location in Tienen.

In the absence of any remaining native culture in Tahiti, Gauguin gradually began to create a convincing fiction of life in a tropical paradise from an eclectic range of sources. After reading Moerenhout’s Voyages aux Iles de Grand Ocean Published in 1892) he constructed some notion of a mythical past, and from a wide selection of photographs and illustrations that he took with him to Tahiti he imposed the cultures of so-called primitive peoples onto Tahitian subject matter in an attempt to make it look authentically ‘savage’. In Ta Matete the poses of the figures derive from an Egyptian fresco painting on a Theban tomb that Gauguin had seen in the British Museum. In the work, he has retained the insistent frieze-like composition of his source, observing each of the women full-face or in rigid profile.

The work represents the prostitutes who frequented the market place in Papeete, in response to the demands of the colonial population. Gauguin’s retention of the hieratic gestures of the original may be an ironic comment on the constrained sexuality of the native Tahitians, forced to pander to a Western audience.

Also from Leiden, Jan Lievens shared Rembrandt’s teacher and studio. The two students’ works verge on the interchangeable, which is true for the Old Man in Oriental Garb, painted in Leiden c. 1628-30, when both artists used the same model.

This painting is more academic than Impressionist in character. It depicts an intersection near the Saint-Lazare railway station with a wide-angle view.

The lines of receding perspective in Caillebotte’s work can often draw us with a disquieting violence into a picture’s spatial depth: his perspective recalls the engineer’s drawing board. This is true of his large, atmospheric painting of the Place de l’Europe on a rainy day as well. Renoir was to paint a similar scene some years later, but his canvas presented a graceful throng of beautiful women and children. Caillebotte’s painting, by contrast, uses wide, open spaces and figural tensions. His people straightforwardly want to get somewhere. The man in the foreground, so close that he is about to step out of the canvas and has had to be cropped below the knee, has the look of a conqueror, the woman on his arm a companion with the air of an afterthought despite her prettiness.

The erotic represented one of Klimt’s most important sources of inspiration. In his later paintings, the sexual subject matter is often concealed beneath a gossamer web of ornament, but in his drawings, the explicitly erotic is constantly evident. Seldom can the themes of sexual coupling and female masturbation have been more frequently or more exquisitely portrayed. Contemporary critics, as well as later commentators, have observed that explicitly sexual subjects incited Klimt to produce some of his finest drawings.

His depictions of the femme fatale and his drawings treating the theme of female sexuality have assured him a place in the history of erotic art.

There are no records of where Vermeyen was trained as an artist. Opinions vary as to whether it was with Jan van Scorel, Bernard van Orley, or Jan Gossart. The early work by Vermeyen, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, establishes a link with Gossart: Vermeyen’s Judith recalls Gossart’s Magdalen in Boston, both exuding an unsettling sense of eroticism.

Ambitious in terms of the subject matter and the complex compositional conception in the style of classical relief sculptures, this print is considered among the most important ones of Marcantonio Raimondi’s prolific career and one of his most accomplished examples of “ancient engraving”. In fact, the composition of the scenes is inspired by a relief dating to the first century A.D. known as the “Tabula iliaca”, a tablet illustrating scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey in a series of small narrative panels arranged around a central scene.

This episode, taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, tells of the exiles fleeing from fallen Troy whose journey is disrupted by Juno. Fortunately for the Greeks, the goddess asks Aeolus, god of winds, to unleash a storm upon the Trojan ships. The animated scene in the centre shows Neptune attempting to calm the winds just as he is about to utter the threatening phrase beginning with the words “Quos Ego”, his efforts visible in his expressive poses evoking the Laoco�n group, a sculpture group which had recently been discovered in Rome.

The Hospital de Santa Cruz in Toledo was designed by Enrique Egas the Elder. Between 1517 and 1524 Covarrubias worked at the hospital under the direction of the Egas brothers.

The hospital was founded by Cardinal Mendoza at the end of the 15th century to centralize assistance to orphaned and abandoned children in the city. The building has a Greek cross plan with four courtyards, two of which were completed. The first is of Covarrubias and gives access to the upper floor through a three-ladder staircase.

The photo shows the courtyard.

To satisfy his immediate need for display, Napoleon had alterations undertaken at the former royal palaces plundered by the revolutionaries, and this work was entrusted mainly to Percier and Fontaine. The main influence was Imperial Rome whose successor Napoleonic France claimed to be.

The work for furnishings of Château Malmaison, acquired for Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, was carried out by Jean-Baptiste Lep�re (1761-1844) to designs by Percier and Fontaine and completed in 1803. Displaying classical architectural forms, strong contrasting colours, mahogany paneling highlighted with gilt bronze appliqu�s, and ceiling paintings in imitation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the interiors exude luxury.

The left wing of the of the Adoration of the Magi Triptych represents Pieter Bronckhorst, the donor of the altarpiece. He can be identified from the family coat-of-arms behind St Peter.

The majestic landscape unfolds in the background of all three panels. Demons haunt the ruined portal in the left wing, where Joseph sits hunched over a fire. The crumbling walls around him are the remains of King David’s palace, near which the Nativity was popularly supposed to have occurred; like the stable, it represents the Synagogue, the Old Law collapsing at the advent of the New. In the field beyond, peasants dance to the sound of bagpipes, a familiar symbol of the carnal life.

This painting by Hudeċek gives its full attention to effects of light.

Many of the Dutch Italianate painters concentrated less on actual Italian themes than on the bright Mediterranean light. There was evidently a demand in the 17th century for paintings of shepherds and cattle in an imaginary and hilly foreign land in which enthusiasts undoubtedly recognized Arcadia. Jan Both, Nicolaes Berchem, Karel Dujardin, Jan Asselyn and Adam Pynacker were masters of the genre.

The present painting showing an extensive Italianate landscape with an elegant company and a lime kiln was executed by the artist when he was living in Italy.

By this painting the beholder is carried away into an idyllic world of bliss. Boucher is a master of salacious scenes and plays artfully with a number of sensuous charms: the flesh tones of the pale skin, the soft and smooth fabrics, the colours and also the lighting of the painting.

Titian and his workshop porduced several versions of the subject.

This painting belongs to a group of pictures that Martin produced over a number of years in preparation for his celebrated The Last Judgment series - the great triptych that was to be his final masterpiece. Martin spent many years developing the compositions that were to become the three paintings that are for many his defining legacy: The Last Judgment, The Plains of Heaven and The Great Day of His Wrath (all Tate Britain, London).